The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/29866.
Heavy on the double definitions, but otherwise a good start to the week.
| ACROSS | ||
| 7 | COUNSEL |
Brief advice (7)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 8 | HEXAGON |
Figure in plane has spell with no end of bad pain (7)
|
| A charade of HEX (‘spell’) plus AGON[y] (‘bad pain’) minus its last letter (‘with no end’). | ||
| 9 | LIKE |
It’s often attached to a post or similar (4)
|
| Double definition; the ‘post’ is to a social website. | ||
| 10 | MATERNITY |
In this state one is making a new life (9)
|
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 12 | PLAIN |
Obvious feature of Middle America (5)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 13 | REBOOTED |
Tried to restore computer, and gave it another kick? (8)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 15 | WILD |
Very angry playwright’s heard (4)
|
| Soinds like (‘heard’) WILDE (Oscar, ‘playwright’). | ||
| 16 | ERASE |
Destroy some trees, a real setback (5)
|
| A hidden (‘some’) reversed (‘setback’) answer in treES A REal’. | ||
| 17 | DIAL |
Face relaxed? (4)
|
| DIAL is LAID BACK (‘relaxed’). | ||
| 18 | SEASHELL |
Open water is hateful: I may get left on the beach (8)
|
| A charade of SEA’S (‘open water is’) plus HELL (‘hateful’). | ||
| 20 | COMET |
In Colorado, had encounter with visitor from space (5)
|
| A charade of CO (‘Colorado’, US plstal abbreviation) plus MET (‘had encounter’). | ||
| 21 | POLLYANNA |
Only Plan A flies for unquenchable optimist (9)
|
| An anagram (‘flies’) of ‘only plan a’. | ||
| 22 | CAGE |
John, who composed four notes (4)
|
| C A G E (‘four notes’). | ||
| 24 | BEDEVIL |
Torment with base wickedness (7)
|
| A charade of BED (‘base’) plus EVIL (‘wickedness’). Simple and effective. | ||
| 25 | GENERAL |
Comprehensive classes, back to school (7)
|
| A charade of GENERA (‘classes’; in taxonomy the two are quite distinct) plus L (‘back to schooL‘). | ||
| DOWN | ||
| 1 | ROTI |
Go off one Caribbean snack (4)
|
| A charade of ROT (‘go off’) plus I (‘one’). | ||
| 2 | ON DEMAND |
One short order available when requested (2,6)
|
| A charade of ‘on[e]’ minus its last letter (‘short’) plus DEMAND (‘order’). | ||
| 3 | YES MAN |
I’m so obsequious, men say nastily (3-3)
|
| An anagram (‘nastily’) of ‘men say’. | ||
| 4 | BEARABLE |
To live on farmland can be endured (8)
|
| A charade of BE (‘live’) plus ARABLE (‘farmland’). | ||
| 5 | CASINO |
A better place (6)
|
| Cryptic definition. | ||
| 6 | COSY |
Modest, keeping son comfortable (4)
|
| An envelope (‘keeping’) of S (‘son’) in COY (‘modest’). | ||
| 11 | TARPAULIN |
Waterproof sheet colleague and I dropped into lake (9)
|
| An envelope (‘dropped into’) of PAUL (‘colleague’, fellow Guardian crossword setter) plus ‘I’ in TARN (‘lake’). | ||
| 12 | PRIDE |
Group of cats, one among several that are deadly (5)
|
| PRIDE being one of the seven deadly sins. | ||
| 14 | EXACT |
Insist upon intercourse, but soprano refused (5)
|
| [s]EX ACT (‘intercourse’) minus the S (‘soprano refused’). | ||
| 16 | EVERY BIT |
The whole lot in English, with remarkable brevity (5,3)
|
| A charde of E (‘English’) plus VERYBIT, an anagram (‘remarkable’ – one of the less justifiable anagrinds) of ‘brevity’. | ||
| 17 | DAMOCLES |
Legendary swordsman does calm exercises (8)
|
| An anagram (‘exercises’) of ‘does calm’. Of course, the sword was not wielded by Damocles, but hung over him. | ||
| 19 | SALVER |
One applying ointment from tray (6)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 20 | CHALET |
Haul into court to obtain small dwelling (6)
|
| An envelope (‘into’) of HALE (‘haul’ – a variant of the same word) in CT (‘court’). | ||
| 21 | PEEL |
Expose the flesh of Prime Minister (4)
|
| Double definition. | ||
| 23 | GNAW |
Keep chewing and not speaking (4)
|
| Sounds like (‘speaking’) NOR (‘and not’). |
Thanks PeterO. A dnf – the first time for me with a Vulcan. I had to reveal ROTI, and LIKE.
Dare I comment on the pronunciation of GNAW? I have tried some on line pronouncers and I can’t hear a r sound.
Thanks Vulcan
Dave Ellison @1 I think that the soundalike is not predicated on there being an ‘r’ in GNAW, but on there being no ‘r’ in a non-rhotic, ‘RP’ pronunciation of ‘nor’.
A nice breezy momday norning waker upper.
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO.
11d depends on the specialised knowledge of the name of another crossword setter, which is not a fair clue to a newcomer.
Thanks PeterO. In EVERY BIT, I didn’t see the anagram after E(nglish) but read it as VERY (remarkable) BIT (brevity), maybe also a bit of a stretch.
The inverse clue DIAL (laid back I have seen several times in cryptics, as recently as in Kite’s Prize a couple of weeks ago Face becoming possibly relaxed (4). In Kite’s clue he’s used two inverse clue indicators, becoming and possibly. I do like Vulcan’s succinct two word clue, with the QM, and an interesting surface which makes sense in its own right.
ROTI doesn’t seem to be a snack nor Caribbean. Perhaps I missed something here
Hard but fair going for a Monday. I really enjoyed CAGE. Not too sure about chalets being small dwellings, some of the ski chalets I have stayed at were enormous.
GNAW was unparsed, thank you PeterO for the elucidation.
Quite tough. I failed to solve 14d EXACT.
New for me: HALE = haul (20d); the fact that people eat/make ROTI is considered to be a Carribbean snack. I see now it was brought to the islands by indentured labourers from India and it is eaten widely across the Caribbean, especially in countries with large Indo-Caribbean populations. But that also means that ROTI could almost as easily be clued as an English snack 😉
Thanks Vulcan and PeterO
I found this much harder than usual for Vulcan, and had a DNF (LIKE, and a partly parsed DECAGON).
TARPAULIN is unfair for new Guardain solvers – relying on knowing the pesuedonym of a different setter.
CAGE prompts me to post CAGE DEAD from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It just repeats those eight notes.
Enjoyable start to the week. Like Peter O, we baulked at genera for classes.
I see that Showaddydadito had already commented on PAUL @3.
PRIDE was my favourite for the cryptic definition. I also liked “swordsman” for Damocles, which of course needs to be interpreted cryptically as well.
I was less keen on CASINO which is a betters (or better’s) place, surely. And I failed on LIKE; wouldn’t “similar” be “alike” rather than “like”? And as for the “post” bit I was too focused on flagpoles, after the poll result here over the weekend.
I guess genera – and indeed any divisions of anything – are classes under the more general meaning of class.
paddymelon@5 indeed I laughed when I saw that clue, as, I imagine, did sheffield hatter who suggested “Relaxed face” in our discussion on that Kite puzzle. Spooky!
Thanks both
I’m another who only knows ROTI as an Indian bread, eaten widely across SE Asia, but I expect it made its way to the Caribbean as well. GNAW held me up for a good while but when the penny dropped I thought it an excellent clue.
I had wire instead of like for 9a. Looking out of the window there are wires attached to telegraph posts/poles and wire/telegram etc, and gave me the right crossers.
Thanks both
I tend to do Monday puzzles out of a sense of duty, rather than for real enjoyment or brain-stretching. (And because I bung The Guardian a modest annual sum for the privilege of doing their crosswords, as I strenuously avoid news content). But at least this engaged the grey cells in two or three cases, and taught me something new (hale=haul). Thus a better-than-average start to the week, so thanks Vulcan, and PeterO.
Caribbean roti seems to be a well established variant on the Indian bread.
Seemed on Vulcan’s tougher side but still great fun. Just the two cryptic definitions this time which surprisingly didn’t put up too much of a fight although needed the checking O before CASINO dropped.
Got lucky with POLLYANNA in that I wrote out the anagram fodder in perfect order purely by chance ready to try and solve it.
Liked REBOOTED and TARPAULIN amongst a lot of others.
Thanks Vulcan and PeterO
Pretty tricky in places and borderline quiptic in others. I liked HEXAGON which was my loi and I also SEASHELL, POLLYANNA, CAGE, BEDEVIL and EXACT.
I took GNAW to be a soundalike for Naw, an Irish or Scottish expression for not, for example it’s naw that. I would have used naw to mean no, when I was a wain.
Ta Vulcan & PeterO.
Had a lovely holiday in St Lucia a few years back. One of the enduring memories is of sitting on the beach and awaiting the arrival every lunchtime of a delightful lady called Liz ( I think) with her coolbox full of rotis – thin flatbreads with various spicy fillings. Superb.
Thanks for the enlightenment re hale = haul. But I had to look them up to find whether ‘haul’ was a synonym of healthy or ‘hale’ was a synonym of pull or drag. (It’s the latter.)
Difficulty seemed to increase as I filled in the puzzle more or less from the top towards the bottom. PEEL was next to last in – I don’t know why, as it’s straightforward enough. BEDEVIL was LOI as I found it hard to drag myself away from SIN at the end (put that in my obit…). I enjoyed especially DIAL, for which the parsing only dawned once I’d bunged it in, and DAMOCLES.
Thanks to PeterO for the blog, especially for clarifying EVERY BIT, where I missed the anagram and tried to justify it to myself as an abbreviated EVERY BITE, which wasn’t very convincing even in an optimistic light.
And thanks to Vulcan for the puzzle of course.
… But I do think ROTIs are essentially Indian!
Regarding CAGE, it brought to mind the BACH motif. (The notes B-flat, A, C, and B-natural, in German notation. ) Used by JSB himself, and several others.
muffin @10 g thanks for the reminder. I do like the PCO, but I had forgotten this one.
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO. I found this just about the right level for a Monday, with BEDEVIL the LOI. But I agree with the comments about referring to PAUL as a fellow setter as I generally think such in-the-club devices tend to exclude. There are plenty of other Pauls to choose from.
Enjoyable enough but did not like the exclusionary use of Paul as others have commented. GNAW was second to last – I thought of it as a homophone for the US “Naw!”
Roti as a flatbread originates from India/south Asia, but roti as a filled flatbread wrap is apparently a common Caribbean snack.
Yes, I did consult Wikipedia. 😁
simonc @21 – ‘HALE’ for ‘haul’ is the standard form used by Shakespeare. In fact, I can’t think that he ever used the latter. Just a couple of examples:
La Pucelle (ie Joan of Arc), in Henry VI Part 1:
‘I am with child, ye bloody homicides:
Murder not then the fruit within my womb,
Although ye hale me to a violent death.’
Benedick in Much Ado:
‘Is it not strange that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out
of men’s bodies? Well, a horn for my money, when
all’s done.’
AlanC@19: Agreed on ‘naw’. ‘Nor’ didn’t even occur to me, which says something.
Didn’t know HALE=haul, but it’s in Chambers. Some clues (LIKE, PRIDE, GNAW) took a while to suss out, so a bit tougher than Vulcan’s usual, but no worse for that. I liked DIAL.
I had no idea that roti are associated with the Caribbean. I’ve only eaten them in Malaysian restaurants.
poc @28: knowing your heritage I was hoping you’d agree. Nor definitely didn’t occur to me either.
poc@28 et al. : i didn’t think of NAW, but the NOR logic gate was what sprang to mind. My long ago physics course had a digital electronics module. Didn’t stick! Despite my many and varied practical talents, electronics, both digital and and analogue, still leaves me baffled. Just some faint echoes of the terminology remain.
AlanC@30, poc@28: Nor me
Did nobody else put “pregnancy” in for 10a at first?
Muffin@12
I was up early this morning.
First thought on waking was “can I get ahead of Muffin?”
I guess I’m a bit slow this Monday as I found this tougher than usual. HALE for haul was new to me, and I squinted at GENERA for classes (like many others). And I am among those who know ROTI only as an Indian bread. The gnaw/nor pun is no worse than many others we have seen, and closer than many, I would say.
Even with crossing letters 9 across could be like, line, or wire and possibly others. Felt too ambiguous to me.
I knew HALE from A.E.Housman’s delightful little metaphor for turning back time:
“And one remembers and forgets,
But ’tis not found again;
Not though they hale, in crimsoned nets,
The sunset from the main.”
Wayne @35 – yes, but LINE or WIRE would then just be simple definitions, which would be a bit out of place in a cryptic. Only LIKE (“or similar”) makes it a double definition.
DuncT@32 – no (I did). Just as valid, to my mind, if it weren’t for the crossers.
Trickier than many Vulcan Mondays, but I did like 17A DIAL. Nice!
Meant to say, I also enjoyed 10A MATERNITY. I do like that type of cryptic clue sometimes. Yes, pregnancy would have made sense too, but obviously the crossers precluded that.
DNF – didn’t get GNAW, LIKE, SALVER. But lots to like: CASINO, REBOOTED, DAMOCLES, GENERAL. Thanks Vulcan and PeterO!
Not sure how MATERNITY is cryptic… DIAL was just recently clued almost identically in Prize – how does this work?
I’m glad some others found this tricky, as I did. The LIKE had a QM and I see it’s social media speak (groan!). I liked the hateful SEASHELL, PRIDE, although there can’t be many other words for ‘group of cats’, and the refused (s)EX ACT.
Thanks Vulcan and PeterO.
Did anyone else notice that the letters of DAMOCLES contain the name MacLeod? A “legendary swordsman” in his own right, if you are aware of the Highlander films.
Monday Vulcans are tougher than they used to be, but I still enjoy them. I liked EXACT and CASINO. I took longer to get DIAL this time than in the recent Prize and was briefly entangled with ET in the Colorado area.
Thanks Vulcan and PeterO.
ROTI and LIKE, and EXACT and DIAL were the two intersecting pairs of clues that held me up at the very end. Liked BEDEVIL and GENERAL which both had me scratching my head for quite a while even with all the crossers in place. Found this a touch more difficult than Vulcan normally is on Monday.
I have a vivid childhood memory from a story picture book of the illustration from The Sword of DAMOCLES biblical tale, with that sword poised above the baby about to be cleft/cleaved? in two at a single stroke…
The Guardian crossword setters often use each other’s names. As Paul is one of the most prolific he is unlikely to be unknown to many.
Thanks Vulcan and PeterO. Mostly fine with me but I too struggled with 9a – I had FILE, which I think works as a cryptic definition.
ronald@44 – I think you might be conflating the Sword of Damocles with the Judgement of Solomon?
To PeterO
I parsed the clue for SEASHELL slightly differently:
Open water is hateful:
SEA IS HELL
I may get left
SEA S HELL
on the beach
SEASHELL
I think that if the setter’s intention had been SEA’S HELL he would have written “Open water’s hateful”, but perhaps not.
Nice Monday crossword. Thank you Vulcan and PeterO.
Very enjoyable. Thank you. A bit trickier than recent Mondays.
A definition in another puzzle for SALVER was “used to carry trifles to the eminent.”
Arable isn’t a definition for farmland. One’s an adjective, one’s a noun. I don’t think coy is really a definition for modest either.
Robi@42 A group of cats is a clowder. A group of kittens is a kindle.
Thanks, Vulcan and PeterO.
Also had WIRE at 9 across – parsed as something attached to a post and ‘similar’ to a post (as in a telegram etc)
Oh dear, DerekTheSheep@44, you’re quite right, those childhood memories are sometimes not that reliable in fact!
Lovely puzzle! Only qualm I have is “better” vs “bettor” in 5d – a bettor would be the one enjoying a casino.
ronald@44: Damocles’ tale is not biblical and doesn’t involve a baby; the one you refer to is probably Solomon’s judgement, where Solomon famously ordered to cut the baby into two and give a half to each claimant (the true mother immediately gave up her claim and was thus found out).
JJimps@51: Point taken. I hadn’t thought of that interpretation!
I’m another who tried PREGNANCY before the crossing letters put me right, and who considered WIRE before hitting on LIKE. Also another for whom the Caribbean snack food based on Indian ROTI is new. I should look to see if I can find some here; I know we have a few Caribbean restaurants.
Layman @41: the clue for MATERNITY is meant to make you imagine moving to Nebraska or whatnot.
UncleUnicorn @53
I had never come across the word “bettor”, but Google tells me that you are quite right. I suppose we all use “gambler” instead, though.
[Me @56: I indeed found two places–one in the Fulton Market district (nice neighborhood) that’s temporarily closed for remodeling, and one in Englewood (sketchy neighborhood). I’m not above venturing to sketchy neighborhoods, at least in the daytime. But it’s also a long way to go for lunch, so…we’ll be waiting for the other one to reopen.]
Roti was on offer everywhere when I worked in Trinidad for a few months. There was also a significant South Asian population, mostly of Indian descent. I assume these two facts are related.
Muffin @57: if you need a new bookie, you’re looking for….a better bettor abettor.
My order of solving tends to be first row, first column, second row, second column, etc., so I gradually work my way from the NW to the SE. It looked like I was going to get a completion on my first pass, but then I just couldn’t crack the last across (25a GENERAL) and the last down (23d GNAW), so dnf. The cup of victory was snatched from my lips just at the last moment. Turns out the latter was an annoying non-rhotic soundalike, so grrr
Fun puzzle otherwise. Favourites 21a POLLYANNA (Only Plan A), 2d ON DEMAND (One short order), 5d CASINO (A better place)
Re. GNAW – ‘nor’: pronunciation is a slippery thing (all about audio/phonetics) and its relationship with the writing system (developed much later and all about visuals/graphics) is really complex. So as a speaker of SSBE (Standard Southern British English – what used to Received Pronunciation [which has become extinct]) I might say “gnaw on a bone” and produce a rhotic (‘r’) sound because of the following vowel at the onset of the (relatively) unstressed word ‘on’. So in the flow of speech, GNAW might well sound like ‘nor’ when uttered by an SSBE speaker. Because I expect very few commenters here have a full command of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), it is almost impossible for us to effectively and clearly share examples and comments concerning pronunciation.
If I write here that I never say ‘nor’ for ‘gnaw’, every reader of that message will have a different idea about what sounds ‘nor’ and ‘gnaw’ represent.
Late to the party
Thanks V&P
Nothing to add
‘cept CAGE’s 4’33”:
Would POINTER work as an alternative answer to 7A? (I guess there wouldn’t really be anything cryptic about the clue if that were the answer… Nevertheless!)
Coloradan @62
I posted a link to Penguin Cafe’s “Cage Dead” @9. The piece lasts exactly 4’33”.
Re BETTER / BETTOR: Chambers has
“bettˈer noun
A person who bets (also bettˈor)”
The OED gives both, with a slight implication that the O spelling is preferable (it shows the E spelling first, presumably for alphabetical reasons).
Thanks for that muffin@64. nho the PCO, but that’s an interesting work and a nice homage.
[Coloradan @66
They are worth listening to. Their founder, Simon Jeffes, had an interesting take on music!. He died prematurely, but more recently his son has revived the band
They collaborated with many musicians. On the album with Cage Dead (possibly even that track?) Nigel Kennedy is a soloist.]
SimonS @65; also Collins:
better2 or esp US bettor2 ˈbɛtə ♫
noun
A person who bets
A fun stroll until several chewy ones, a few of which held out until I returned to them just earlier. Had to reveal LIKE, but I thought it was still good, accessible Monday fare.
Apart from going through the alphabet for the two non-crossers of 21d, my biggest hurdle was in that, on 10 (after inserting pregnancy early, but then realising it couldn’t be) I thought and somewhat hoped the clue would be a tad more cryptic than it was, and inserted MODERNITY – which I think works well. Thus 11 was a holdout until I eventually hit the check button, which I hate doing as if I have to use it I don’t find any solve a full victory.
So many double definitions rendered this totally beyond me.
7a, for example, I could have stared at for years.
Vulcan probably the hardest setter for me.
Thanks both.
I’m still struggling with Damocles being a “swordsman”. There’s nothing in the legend to suggest he either owned or used one. By analogy, are we to assume that Occam was a barber….?
Tim @72: I suppose Damocles was a “swordsman” in the sense that he was a man very much associated with a sword. Not the normal meaning of the word, sure, but it doesn’t seem any more of a stretch than say “barman” for a composer which we see quite a lot.
Thanks Lord Jim @73. I’m very much a novice at these cryptics and perhaps I am thinking too literally at times – I would never have thought of barman in that way for instance. I guess it’s down to experience. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing reference to Occam’s Razor somehow in a future puzzle! 🙂
Tim
Store away “barman”. It nearly always means “composer”!
[Tim@74: i now have this image of William of Ockam kitted out red drapes with black lapels, sideburns, a ginormous quiff and a wickedly sharp cut-throat razor.]
[Coloradan@66 – so much of the PCO’s music is worth spending time with – try “music for a found harmonium”: irresistible! ]
Derekthesheep@76 that was the image I was projecting!
As predicted a long time ago by AP@12, I had a little chuckle when reading the clue for DIAL. A lot of the rest was quite tricky for Vulcan. So many of his “cryptic” definitions are criticised for being just straight definitions, and I thought I’d spotted another one at 9a and wrote in LINE.
I also failed to find BEDEVIL and eventually just wrote in the obviously wrong NEMESIS and went back to watching the snooker on the telly.
Thanks to Vulcan and PeterO.
HAJ#44. I think Paul clued as colleague is unfair in TARPAULIN. For a start it’s not stated that it is Vulcan’s colleague. And not appropriate in the Monday slot where there may be newer solvers.
[Tim@78: Now I have “Ock the knife” playing in my head. The Armstrong version, of course.]
I too was stumped by hawl-hale until I remembered that in French a chemin de halage is a towpath, so we get the English hale from the Norman French haler.
[You’re right DerekTheSheep@77; also enjoyed the harmonium on “Southern Jukebox Music”. Thanks to you and muffin for pointing me toward Simon Jeffes and the PCO. I’ll be exploring further!]
I’ve not been solving the Grauniad long. I felt privileged to get the PAUL in-joke.
Anybody who is a learner solver won’t have finished anyway; and TARPAULIN was too obvious (imo) to need the cryptic part; an extra non-parsed clue is scarcely disastrous for morale!
Morning all.
GNAW’s clue hit a complete mental blind spot for me, so that remained unsolved at lights out.
I thought that this was quite tough for a Monday.
Thanks setter, blogger, and posters.
I’m coming late to the party, but (a) I agree that expecting the solver to know colleague = PAUL is wholly inappropriate for a Monday puzzle; (b) the Guardian’s thoroughly irritating love affair with unfriendly grids continues, which is also a bad idea for a Monday.
This grid has four lights with a majority of unchecked letters, and an arrangement in which the crossers give the solver relatively few initial letters. I disagree with quite a bit of what Ximenes wrote, but I am wholly with him in his dislike of grids like that.
Thank you to hatter @79 for reassuring me that in putting LINE for 9a, while wrong, I wasn’t being entirely thick.
Didn’t know ROTI.
Got a little amusement from the discussion of whether GNAW sounds like NOR. If you ask the right question, which IMHO is whether GNAW sounds vaguely similar to NOR, you deprive yourself of something to complain about, which (we being British and all that) would never do…
Thanks, all.
For 16d I had EVERY WIT – ‘an archaic expression meaning entirely, completely, or in every respect’, reasoning that remarkable = very and brevity = wit (as in the soul of), but I wasn’t very happy with it. Then reluctantly accepted ‘bit’ for brevity, but thought it a bit of a stretch. Finally set right by PeterO about the anagram of brevity, (but also agree that remarkable is maybe a bit of a stretch as an anagrind). Great puzzle overall – thanks Vulcan and PeterO!
A good one on the whole.
The ‘inverse’ type of clue is a new one on me so couldn’t parse DIAL. I doubt I ever will spot them because I can’t see a way of hinting at it in the clue.
I think the use of the word ‘classes’ in 25a is ok. It’s being used in the ordinary sense to mean classifications rather than the technical one in biology.
NeilH@86 re GNAW/NOR, I’m not bothered by variations in vowel sounds, so yes they sound vaguely similar in that way, but the non rhotic R soundalike is always very annoying for this rhotic speaker. After a nice break, we seem to have had a lot of them lately
Mig@89, as a fellow Canadian rhotic speaker, I have no complaints about non-rhotic puns. We have listened to non-rhotic speakers in British film, television and theatre productions enough to be on the lookout for such pronunciation.
I thoroughly enjoyed the blog this time, especially the exchange about John Cage and the PCO. Derek, Ock the Knife is my earworm for today. (4’33” just doesn’t work as an earworm, unless you are a monk.)